BEES - THE WINTERING PROBLEM

At the near approach of returning winter, the question "how can we most successfully preserve our bees ?" – is being discussed with renewed interest. The extreme mortality of the winter of 1880 and '81 taught our veteran apiculturists the important lesson that the most successful of their number do not know all that is worth knowing upon the subject. Experimental knowledge seemed to be contradicted, established rules overturned and science refuted, men who by the world had been esteemed for their wisdom bore no trophies of success or victory, and the long road traveled furnished no finger-boards to direct us in the right path. Previous to last winter we had been taught that the observance of a few well-defined regulations would insure almost uniform success. A full supply of winter stores, warmth secured by the use of chaff cushions or similar protection, and proper ventilation, were the most important requisites of success. As before intimated, during last winter and spring, theories set up and based upon past experience became as visionary dreams, and whether or not the result left us any lessons of value, is still a matter of uncertainty. 

A few days since, while at the farm of my neighbor R--, he called my attention to two colonies of bees kept by him during the severe weather of last winter. He started in with two colonies and they both wintered well, sent out at least four strong, natural swarms during the early summer and are well supplied with honey for winter. One of the hives had a hinged door which occupied one side entire. The door had become so warped that it could not be closed during the preceding summer, the combs had been built out three or four inches beyond the side of the hive, and during the entire winter and spring of '80 and '81 that colony of bees stood entirely unprotected (the open side facing the west), the snow and rain beating into it. Talk about double-walled hives, division boards and chaff cushions! Those two swarms (the second hive was no better than the one described) seem to offer a premium upon neglect and carelessness. 

This man has not a neighbor who, by the adoption of every “new-fangled notion” of modern invention, can show a percentage of loss so small as his own, while he never thinks it possible that his bees need any more protection or warmth than his chimney tops upon the roof. I transferred a colony that wintered well with holes through the sides of the hive into which I could thrust my hand. Are we to attribute these examples to accident or do they furnish us a lesson which it is well for us to heed ? Is it not possible that, goaded on by our zeal to do our work well, we are doing it altogether too well, or, in other words, that we have “doctored many of our bees to death?” With tight division boards upon the sides, or with double-walled hives and heavy chaff cushion upon the top is it not possible that ventilation is insufficient? 

Now I hope my bee keeping friends will not turn up their noses and consign me to the dark ages of the past. I am as eager as any of you to take every substantial step forward, but the facts as related, exist, and how to explain them away by the light of modern scientific apiculture, I know not. Please give me light. 
 
C. T. Leonard
in: The Ohio Farmer. Vol. 60, No. 21,  (Nov 19, 1881)  

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